Dress

Casual, vaguely post-hippie; T-shirts, jeans, running shoes,
Birk-enstocks (or bare feet). Long hair, beards, and moustaches are common.
High incidence of tie-dye and intellectual or humorous ‘slogan’
T-shirts. Until the mid-1990s such T-shirts were seldom computer-related, as
that would have been too obvious — but the hacker culture has since developed
its own icons, and J. Random Hacker now often wears a Linux penguin or BSD
daemon or a DeCSS protest shirt.

A substantial minority prefers ‘outdoorsy’ clothing —
hiking boots (“in case a mountain should suddenly spring up in the
machine room”, as one famous parody put it), khakis, lumberjack or
chamois shirts, and the like.

After about 1995 hacker dress styles assimilated some influence from
punk, gothic, and rave subcultures. This was relatively mild and has
manifested mostly as a tendency to wear a lot of black, especially when
‘dressed up’ to the limit of formality. Other markers of those
subcultures such as piercings, chains, and dyed hair remain relatively
uncommon. Hackers appear to wear black more because it goes with everything
and hides dirt than because they want to look like goths.

Very few hackers actually fit the National
Lampoon Nerd stereotype, though it lingers on at MIT and may have
been more common before 1975. At least since the late Seventies backpacks
have been more common than briefcases, and the hacker ‘look’ has
been more whole-earth than whole-polyester.

Hackers dress for comfort, function, and minimal maintenance hassles
rather than for appearance (some, perhaps unfortunately, take this to extremes
and neglect personal hygiene). They have a very low tolerance of suits and
other ‘business’ attire; in fact, it is not uncommon for hackers
to quit a job rather than conform to a dress code. When they are somehow
backed into conforming to a dress code, they will find ways to subvert it, for
example by wearing absurd novelty ties.

Female hackers almost never wear visible makeup, and many use none at
all.